When I was at <prev. job> and folks were working on <game>, the feedback I kept giving was that the design would unavoidably draw in an audience of primarily miserable, hyper-aggressive, antisocial players.
Sometimes this stuff is fundamentally built-into and encouraged by a game's design
and like yeah the marketing has been mismanaged, is fun to riff on, who up wresting their shieldbreaker from enemy wardens etc. but thats not the vibe on youtube. the vibe is really dark. at some point you gotta say what on earth is "good" marketing when this is the audience you have to sell to
The community of a game is in many ways a by-product of that game's design, and of design considerations that need to be thought of at the beginning if you want to be intentional about them.
When you're designing a multiplayer game you are also designing your game's community and social space
Jan 27, 2026 19:49I actually make this argument about WoW vs FFXIV. WoW’s faction system, world PVP, tagging system, and gathering system lead to player interactions being adversarial in nature, thus leading to a hostile player base.
FFXIV, by contrast, doesn’t have these systems, and thus player interactions are, at worst, neutral. This leads to a friendlier player base.
